It has been suggested that Internet traffic is expected to quadruple by the year 2015. Furthermore, reports have shown that global average connection rates have increased 43% year-over-year and global average peak rates increased 67% year-over-year. Concurrently, the sophistication of internal and external network attacks in the form of viruses, worms and malware of all sorts has increased dramatically.
Network administrators continue to be tasked with providing network security and they often rely on various systems for network security. For example, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) detect network attacks, but some operate as passive systems that do not offer much more than after-the-fact attack notification. In contrast, Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPSs) have been developed to complement traditional security products such as firewalls by proactively analyzing network traffic flows by scanning incoming and outgoing traffic. However, deep packet inspection by IPSs typically utilize a significant amount of resources and can become a network bottleneck if their performance does not keep up with increasing connection rates and throughput bandwidth.